One of the great delights of life is returning to a movie you haven’t seen in years and discovering, oh happy days, that it is every bit as good as you remember.
Or, in the case of Jan de Bont’s 1996 tornado masterpiece, Twister, even better.
What makes this 28-year-old feat of persistent zeitgeist relatability – and yes, this reviewer, too busy trying to consume everything new he’s attracted to in the pop culture universe, hasn’t seen it again since its cinema release way back when – all the more remarkable is that in many ways, Twister is an out-of-the-box ’90s blockbuster with all the expected tropes and clichés well and truly in place.
But then as anyone who has consumed more than a few stories in their lifetime, and most of us have gone way beyond that, will know, it’s not so much the fact that the pieces are present, thought that’s important, but it’s what you do with them, and Bont does some substantially good things, indeed.
For a start, he hits the ground running with some exposition that absolutely knocks it out of the park; in an admirably efficient scene, we see a family, including one frightened little girl (Alexa Vega), on a farm out on the plains of Oklahoma rush to their storm shelter in 1969 as a, F5 tornado, the very worst and most destructive kind, bears down upon them.
———- SPOILER AHEAD !!!!! ———- While the little girl, her dog and her mum survive, her father does not, blown traumatically out of the shelter as he tries to hold onto the shelter door which eventually cannot withstand the titanic forces mother nature marshalls against it.
That woman grows up to be ———- SPOILER AHEAD !!!!! ———- one of the lead characters of the movie, Jo Harding (Helen Hunt) who demonstrates, thanks to the still-raw grief furiously spinning barely below the surface, a frenetic, obsessed need to get to the bottom of what causes tornadoes to form and why they then act the way they do.
Her zealotry to solve the mysteries of tornadoes and increase the warning time for people from three minutes to fifteen minutes drives her endlessly on, her focus so intense that she’s driven away her husband, Bill (Bill Paxton) who has a natural gift for tornado sleuthing but who’s chosen a quiet new life as a weatherman with fiancée Dr Melissa Reeves.
That opening scene, coupled with our introduction to an adult Helen as the leader of an oddball team of researchers including Philip Seymour Hoffman as Dusty Davies and Alan Ruck as Rabbit who exhibit a hooting, hollering fatalistic zeal for storm chasing, establishes in very short but emotionally arresting order that here is someone who is scarred and broken and who lives only to best the enemy that excoriated her happy childhood and left an obsessed shell of her former self.
It’s masterful characterisation, for which we can thank screenwriters Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin, and it powers a propulsive narrative that, while it barely pauses for breath, somehow finds the time to really reach into our hearts, crush them and then build them back all over again.
That is the brilliance of this film, and while it has all the expected bits and bobs in place from quirky characters to massively epic and twisty-turny scenes to emotional scene that veer into melodrama but sometime avoid feeling like they’re cheesy and trite, it emerges as a blockbuster with heart and soul and a huge amount of deeply moving substance.
So, yes, while you likely initially turn up for the visceral front row seat to death, danger, disaster and destruction, you stay absolutely glued to your seat because what comes to really matter to you is not so much the bangs and the booms, though they are fantastically memorable – and even funny; the cow scene alone is worth the price of admission … “Another cow!” / “Actually I think it’s the same one.” – but the people who suffer at the hands of the tornadoes and those who give their lives, and emotional sanity, to make sure the former number diminishes markedly going into the future.
It’s a masterful move because the entire point of Twister, disaster p*rn aside, is how natural disasters like this affect people.
The casualties are many and their injuries grievous and long-lasting.
Harding is an obsessed wreck, and while she’s damn good at her work, she’s failed to keep her personal relationships in a healthy shape, aside from her team and her much loved Aunt Meg (Lois Smith), and even though that’s great for the science, it’s not good for her and much of the film is devoted to how realised her scientific goals ending up healing her in some pretty substantial ways.
And it’s her healing that has ripples effects across the estranged relationship with Bill, with whom she’s still very much in love – and pssst! He is the same back; sorry Melissa – her team and overall how successful they are.
For all of its natural disaster pizzazz, it’s this strong emotional current that carries you through the film; we come to understand that while tornadoes are impressive and scary and huge, they also ruin and wreck peoples’ lives and Twister never minimises this, keeping it as the central emotional core of the film.
That’s likely why Twister feels so good all these years later.
While the special effects are quite as impactful as they once were (though they are still vibrantly good, even allowing for the fact they are almost three decades old), Twister holds up, and magnificently so, because it was made as a film about people in the very worst of places and times and how they hold with past trauma impinging on them, and because of that truly affecting focus, this is one ’90s blockbuster that more than holds up and which reminds us how powerful it can be when the epic and the emotional are given equal weighting.